Reading Schopenhauer when you felt melancholy was like taking off your clothes when you felt cold

…it was good to be back inside the world of feeling.

'Possibility is everything that has ever happened. The purpose of science is to find out where the limits of possibility end. When we have achieved that—and we shall—there will be no more magic, no more superstition, there will just be what is .’

You realised that we weren't special. We weren't superheroes. We were just old. And that, in cases such as Hendrich, it didn't really matter how many years or decades or centuries had passed, because you were always living within the parameters of your personality. No expanse of time or place could change that. You could never escape yourself.

I never tired of the way birds moved when they weren't in flight. It was a series of tableaux rather than continuous movement. Staccato. Stuck moments.

‘The past is never gone. It just hides.’

It made me lonely. And when I say lonely, I mean the kind of loneliness that howls through you like a desert wind. It wasn't just the loss of people I had known but also the loss of myself. The loss of who I had been when I had been with them.

‘History isn't something you need to bring to life. History already is alive. We are history. History isn't politicians or kings and queens. History is everyone. It is everything.’

The longer you live, the more you realise that nothing is fixed. Everyone will become a refugee if they live long enough. Everyone would realise their nationality means little in the long run. Everyone would see their worldviews challenged and disproved. Everyone would realise that the thing that defines a human being is being a human .